Over the years, the number of cloud service providers who provide Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) has grown. IaaS generally involves a service provider outsourcing hardware to support operations, including virtualized compute, storage, networking and other information technology (IT) infrastructure resources, typically on a per-use basis. The service provider often owns the hardware and is typically responsible for hosting, operating and maintaining the equipment.
There is a shift in paradigm where users/organizations “rent” such virtualized infrastructure to deploy and run their applications and services without needing to worry about scalability and upfront costs. Users can rapidly provision virtualized IT infrastructure resources by using IaaS. However, IaaS presents its own concerns. For example, IaaS providers have occasionally experienced outages that have lasted for several hours, which can be unacceptable for mission critical applications/services.
For the reasons stated above, and for other reasons that will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification, there is a need in the art for alternative apparatus and methods for using IaaS services.